I believe all Chrome extensions are pure HTML and JS. Many people have criticized that learning how to use XUL is a pain, and that most memory leaks and instability issues come from poorly coded extensions. Everytime Firefox has a major release, they break all old extensions. People either update/re-write their extensions or they don't work anymore. If Mozilla says the latest Firefox requires your extension to operate as pure HTML and JS, it wouldn't be the end of the world.

The only reason I'm currently still using Firefox is because of some unique extensions, you can fully control how your browser looks and how it operates. With this functionality removed I would have no reason left to stick with Firefox.

Mark parent +1 insightful. Compare Chrome's adblocking vs Firefox's, for example. Firefox wins. And there are lots of cool, useful addons, like TabHunter, which is a cool way to navigate through lots of tabs. Or FireFTP -- an FTP client that works wherever Firefox does. Or DownThemAll, a download manager that works wherever Firefox does. And so on.

I think what Firefox _really_ needs is a Chrome-like Task Manager that shows you exactly how much memory/CPU/network your add-on is consuming. For example, on Chrome I know that the Gmail checker add-on takes 10MB memory, and ~0 CPU/network. I can always uninstall it if I think that's too much. Maybe when Firefox's Electrolysis project for per-process tabs goes mainstream, this feature will be implemented.

I think what Firefox _really_ needs is a Chrome-like Task Manager that shows you exactly how much memory/CPU/network your add-on is consuming.

I have been rallying for this functionality for years. It would improve the Firefox situation so, so much, and would likely provide a very useful tool for plugin/extension writers to troubleshoot/debug their work more thoroughly. Quality would go up across the line.

The way things are going, browsers are becoming more OS like every couple months. Gazelle is supposed to be the furthest implementation of such things to date, but Chrome is already well within "useful and well designed" territory.

What we need is the ability granularly manage independent elements within our browsers, because they're running a huge variety of different code: extensions which perform separate tasks; javascript on many different pages, Flash, embedded video, Java, etc. Really, when it comes down to it, most peoples' browsers are running more independently developed instances of code than they are running actual applications. (For instance, I'm running Firefox with 14 extensions and 3 plugins right now; I'm only running 6 independent applications, in addition to firefox).

The way it stands, Firefox is on par with Windows 3.1, in terms of process management. The closest thing to managing processes we've got is "taking a long time" javascript detection. Flash crashes, and Firefox crashes (unless you're using a crap wrapper). Extensions lead to Firefox leaking, and there's no way to granularly manage any of the data.

I saw Chrome's "process manager" for the first time the other day and was quite impressed. The fact that Google collects information via Chrome, and its limited extension/plugin repository (which doesn't provide the functionality I want) has so far kept me from giving it much of a serious look, but now, I'm having second thoughts.

Even if Chrome is in beta (and, to be fair, Google "beta" IS equivalent to normal people's "service pack 2"), you are still allowed to say "Firefox 3.5 is superior to the Chrome beta in way X", and that information is useful to people choosing between Firefox and Chrome who care about X.

With this functionality removed I would have no reason left to stick with Firefox.

You are so right. If they really did do this then they would lose so many of their users. This is so perfectly Netscape of them and as such I'd like to link to a suitable story from Netscape's past [joelonsoftware.com] in the hope to god that the Mozilla people can learn from the past.

Dear Mozilla people:

if you are defining a new plugin interface only use it if it's better

if it is better; then implement the old interface using the new one. If you can't then it isn't better.

prove that you can refactor the plugins so that 95% or more of old plugins (and 100% of popular ones) work in the new system

Until you get 90% of old plugins working, don't let the new system anywhere near production.

Make it the responsibility of the people with the new interface to get the refactoring working for those 90% of plugins.

It's so simple. The new should not be allowed to break the old. If the new has to do that, then it's design is bad.

To quote:"Moving right along, world-class software systems always have an extension language and a plug-in system — a way for programmers to extend the base functionality of the application. Sometimes plugins are called "mods". It's a way for your users to grow the system in ways the designer didn't anticipate....Firefox has a plugin system. It's a real piece of crap, but it has one, and one thing you'll quickly discover if you build a plug-in system is that there will always be a few crazed programmers who learn to use it and push it to its limits. This may fool you into thinking you have a good plug-in system, but in reality it has to be both easy to use and possible to use without rebooting the system; Firefox breaks both of these cardinal rules, so it's in an unstable state: either it'll get fixed, or something better will come along and everyone will switch to that."

It's a joke son. Laugh. Or not as the mood suites you. I just find it amusing that we're trying to stuff more and more things into the browser. There has got to be a recursion joke in there somewhere. I'll perhaps think about it after a few more cups of coffee. Or maybe I will go back to work. Sigh.

Check out the products list at Mozilla Labs [mozillalabs.com]. There are some interesting ideas being tossed around. They are exploring sync technology in a project called Weave. There is a project called Prism that lets you split web apps out from the browser. It seems like Mozilla is also trying to evolve and improve the way people use and develop for their browser system. Take a look at that page and decide for yourself. I think the author of the article should have presented what else is going on with Mozilla's dev

Just as a note, vimperator is an excellent example of how not to write extensions in a number of ways. Leaks all over the place, assertions firing due to it doing things that are explicitly forbidden by various contracts, etc.

I disagree, the links seem appropriate in their respective contexts.
However, TFS' question strikes me as superfluous -- FF already has lots of
extensions of questionable quality. They're simply looking to transition to
a new implementation of extensions, which hopefully will bog the browser down
less and create fewer security issues by sticking with simpler code.
Can't see how that would be "the wrong direction", frankly...

I agree that Jetpack will make it easier for developers to create apps and will also likely result in safer apps that don't fail as often. However, this is only apparent in hindsight, now that we realize writing add-ons with HTML/CSS/JS type technologies is probably smart. The fact is that Firefox has a significant number of extremely useful applications that might go beyond what is possible to implement with Jetpack. My business uses some Firefox extensions that are absolutely critical to us. I don't mind if Mozilla goes to Jetpack, but I think that they should keep support for traditional extensions. If they get rid of extensions, they will hurt a lot of people. Going to "Jetpack only" would make more sense if they were starting from a clean slate, but currently I think they have a responsibility to existing users.

I never did think Mozilla was headed in the right direction. I've long shunned their browsers because, to me, they were bloatware, overly complex and bug-prone and not even offering the features I'd come to love in the competition.

But that didn't prevent Mozilla from making a very successful browser.

So, if now I say that I don't think they are headed in the right direction, what does that really tell anyone? Obviously, their success depends on other things than what I think about it. I wish them all the best, I hope they'll enjoy working on their products, and we'll see how they pan out in practice.

...and not even offering the features I'd come to love in the competition.

FF had tabs long before most other browsers (except perhaps Konquerer), had anti-phishing, and in general was once light and fast.

As for features today? AdBlock Plus, BetterPrivacy, NoScript... those three alone are more than worth the weight, not to mention the tons of multimedia add-ons.

Also, FWIW, Firefox isn't the only big boy on the bloat scale, at least in Windows. IE only appears light because it has a habit of stuffing most of its weight into a pile of processes hidden under the catch-all name of "

FF had tabs long before most other browsers (except perhaps Konquerer)

I think that feature (and many others) were primarily copied from Opera.

While I do think Firefox is bloating, and really think they've made some questionable decisions (such as force-feeding the terrible Awesomebar), I can't think of anything wrong with this move. The extension model needs revision, and only elitist bastards would be upset that they're making it simpler and more accessible.

The extension model needs revision, and only elitist bastards would be upset that they're making it simpler and more accessible.

And possibly more limited. Are jetpacks really going to have the same full access to Firefox internals? Not every useful extension repaints the UI.

I'm also concerned that the bar is already low enough that most of the extensions out there are total crap. By setting the bar on the floor, every idiot will be able to produce terrible jetpacks. Do you really want to wade through 100,000 crappy jetpacks to find the dozen nuggets?

The Apple app store is already getting there. Search for some useful term, and there are two dozen apps that pop up, and you waste half an hour wading through them all to find one that's reasonably close to what you want. Will Firefox really be better if adddons.mozilla.org starts featuring jetpacks that are no better than a "Lady Gaga-fier" or a "DUDE!!1! I MAD A J3FF PHILT3R!!11!!"

Elitist bastards live better than the standard rabble because they set the bar higher. Not everybody wants to be surrounded by crapware.

So you're arguing that we should make creating Firefox extensions difficult because good programmers make good software?

I wanted to be clear because there are about a thousand arguments against such a position - of which I'm enumerate a few:

1) good programmers != good application designers2) good programmers may not have the next cool idea3) even good programmers would like programming to be easier4) making programming more difficult than it has to be is NEVER A GOOD IDEA5) good programmers might not say "Lady Gaga-fier" but will say some stupid 3l33t non-sense....

That said, I do hope that they keep extensions around for a while, as it seems Jetpack doesn't do everything yet.

I'm also concerned that the bar is already low enough that most of the extensions out there are total crap. By setting the bar on the floor, every idiot will be able to produce terrible jetpacks. Do you really want to wade through 100,000 crappy jetpacks to find the dozen nuggets?

Voting systems, bloggers, word of mouth, the list goes on. That argument doesn't work online if there are lots of likeminded people (and if you think that your needs are different from everyone else's then there's no point looking no matter what system is used, since nobody else would have scratched your unique itch)

The add-ons (their functionality specifically) that you mention are in no way exclusive to FF. You just think they are. Similarly with tabs - it was not only Konqueror that had them, in the times before FF even existed

As for bloat - I imagine suggesting much lighter alternatives won't go down well, so try this: run Seamonkey instead of FF for some time. It's almost hilarious that Seamonkey is for long time faster, specifically in "snappy" area, able to survive much heavier browsing and more stable generally

IE only appears light because it has a habit of stuffing most of its weight into a pile of processes hidden under the catch-all name of "svchost.exe", with additional chunks hidden in the OS itself.

This is exactly why sysadmins shouldn't pretend to be developers, and vice-versa. I don't use IE a lot (only if Firefox and Chrome both fail) but this statement is just wrong, a lazy repeating of a tech 'urban legend'. Go run Process Explorer and it'll show you what the svchosts are doing (hint: hosting services like DNS clients, etc). As for "additional chunks hidden in the OS itself", where exactly is this hidden, especially now that modern IEs don't even have any filesystem-browsing capability?

IE (like Mozilla, like Chrome) uses a lot of DLLs, but memory use etc is counted per process, and what IE reported upto IE7 was actually a fair representation of what each process used. With IE8 on, there are per-site processes like Google Chrome (not per-tab for both browsers as usually thought -- in fact, IE8 released this feature before Chrome) and you can get a better idea of how much memory a site is consuming.

As for "additional chunks hidden in the OS itself", where exactly is this hidden, especially now that modern IEs don't even have any filesystem-browsing capability?

The trident engine loads when Explorer loads. Replace the shell with an alternative shell, and disable DLL preloading with a tool like Autoruns. IE start time will shoot up to crazy levels. When I did it on an old Win2k-AthlonXP PC (obviously with IE6), it jumped from about 6 seconds cold start to 20 seconds.

Not much point doing it though. Lots of programs depend on Trident, like Steam.

P.S. Disabling Explorer knocked off 45MB memory usage. Disabling Trident knocked off another 25MB. Since 25MB is roughly what Firefox uses to display Google, shouldn't IE8 use 1MB? The rendering engine is already loaded into memory - unless it has to make copies or something.

abit of stuffing most of its weight into a pile of processes hidden under the catch-all name of "svchost.exe"

No it doesn't, you don't know what you're talking about.

with additional chunks hidden in the OS itself.

Those are called shared libraries, and every OS worth its salt uses them. I'm sorry you think its logical for Windows to reimplement and reload a web browser in every application that uses one (which is most now days) rather than sharing them. Sadly, again, this is something that every half way de

To be honest, as a developer, I've been trying to understand it myself. Firefox feels snappy on low-end machines (even VMs) for light browsing (few tabs open) and only a couple of extensions loaded. It becomes sluggish with loads of tabs open, esp if kept open for a long time. My guess is that despite the improvements to the garbage collector, the one-process-for-all-tabs architecture is to blame.

I thought it was headed in the right direction... back before it was called Firefox. But by the time the 1.0 milestone rolled around, the browser was pretty bloated. I remember the IT department at university was recommended its use over the old, security hole-filled Internet Explorer 6. The problem was, the browser kept generating a huge >1MiB prefs file, which was problematic since a regular user's roaming profile capacity was really small.

Why in the name of Justin Timberlake would I install an add-on to block another add-on I installed?

Because of the broken web paradigm. There's nothing wrong with Flash, innately; it's a useful tool. The problem is how all browsers interpret embedded applets and scripts, and autoexecute them. Because of that ridiculous design decision, made many years ago, flash (and javascript, dynamic html, etc.) have ended up being more irritation than useful. No executable code should load and run automatically... but because that's the way the internet evolved, we need an array of tools to add fine-toothed user control back in.

I initially chose Firefox for all the "wrong" reasons. It was open source, where IE was not. It was more secure by virtue of its smaller adoption footprint, where IE was the fat target. And it was not by Microsoft. I did not choose it because it was feature rich, or less buggy.

Since then I have grown to appreciate it more and more, mostly through the added value I get from extensions. Surfing is definitely faster. I have many more convenience options. I have control over the typical crap that blocks the content off most web sites.

The big questions I have are: why make developers of perfectly good extensions rewrite their code? For that matter, will some of them give up because they don't want to reimplement their code in Jetpacks? Or maybe they've already stopped supporting their old extensions, and now they'll just die.

Given all that, I wonder if his comments were more to stir up community reactions than an actual product roadmap?

(that comment is by the blog author; the key part is "I personally don't think we're anywhere near the point where we can look at the old-style extension model and claim it's not needed anymore. But the goal is to drive everything that can be moved to Jetpacks to that model, because it's a better model for users and developers." )

TBH, Microsoft kind of earns it... unless called out publicly, they do have a habit of regularly doing things that seem designed from the start to squash innovation, destroy computing freedoms, and in general make tech a raging PITA for anyone who isn't them.

Also, Microsoft tends to get a pass far more often than other corps... take the whole Danger data loss affair. About a week of techie outrage, a couple days of MSM mentions, and that was it. If it was Oracle, IBM, or one of the other big boys who borked customer's data, you can bet hard money that the mainstream media would have called for some CEO's head on a platter. You could also bet hard money that the whole 'cloud' hype would have come to a crashing halt... instead of carrying on like nothing happened. Hell, if that happened to a smaller player, that small player would've been Chapter 11 within a month.

Microsoft, via the Gates Foundation, killed legislation that would have removed intellectual property restrictions from drug markets in poor countries. They actively and for their own gain perpetuate the death and suffering of millions and millions of people. Who gives a flying fuck what they did about innovation in the IT industry compared to that? They're no better than any other mass murderers.

Have anything to back this up, or are you just talking out of your ass?

There's this new thing called The Google. It works really well. You just type something like "Gates.Foundation drug patents [google.com]" and it lets you start to find out things for yourself. In this case, the first few links will lead you to find out about UNTIAID [wikipedia.org]. Basically, the story goes like this. During the 1990s, developing nations (especially India and Brazil) began to amass the manufacturing capability and expertise to produce advanced pharmaceuticals for minute fractions of the wholesale cost of those drugs on the world marketplace, the price being set by the IP holders in Western countries who enjoyed the political access necessary to keep extending patent lifetimes and extensions almost indefinitely. At the start of the Noughties, a crisis was looming when several companies, mainly Indian, began retailing vast quantities of anti-HIV/malaria/TB drugs to poorer countries (mostly African) at costs way below what Western companies were prepared to sell at. For a while it looked as if literally half the world was ready to secede from the international patent system in an effort to provide medication for as many of their sick populations as possible. After several rounds of negotiation, within which the Gates and Clinton foundations were major players, a compromise was established. Rich Western countries, NGOs, and foundations made it clear that their aid money was contingent on poorer countries recognising Western patents and refusing to buy from "rogue" companies or countries. In return, their access to grant/loan/development monies was assured, and several cartels and exchanges established whereby these countries could purchase Western patent-protected medications or the right to produce such medications at "below market" costs (but still literally several times the cost of producing such medications outside the patent system). UNITAID is one of these exchanges. The Gates foundation is one of the major players in UNITAID, and its lobbying recently has concentrated on maintaining relatively high remuneration fees to the Western IP holders, thereby maintaining relatively high costs for the drugs. For the poorer countries, it's a classic Faustian bargain: they get grant money, but they have to spend much of this money buying higher-priced drugs. Given the public-private partnerships and funding/tax arrangements, it's a classic example of corporate welfare where grant money nominally allocated to developing countries is funnelled back to Western IP holders, either as actual cash or as tax deferments.

Many hundreds millions of people are getting necessary drugs. But many hundreds of millions are not. Transporting drugs at cartel prices from developed nations or even manufacturing them under licence has the effect, still, of restricting access to those drugs for poorer at literally orders of magnitude less cost, and also retarding the development of manufacturing and research industries within developing countries dedicated to producing their own drugs at fractional cost. Sometimes "aid" has the effect of eliminating development, a pattern we've seen again and again enacted in post-colonial economic systems.

grant money freely given to them

Grant money given along with conditions that it be spent within certain cartels with pricing set not by market forces but by manufacturers' lobbies is not "money freely given". Especially because the manufacturers get a double benefit: sales proceeds and tax credits because of their "charity" in selling their drugs "below cost" (that is, below the high cost they claimed they could seel these drugs for, whereas in reality their sales at these prices in developing countries would have been close to zero).

As for "mass murderer", well, that wa snot my choice of phrase. It's a matter of perspective. In a couple of hundred years, when people are writing the history of late capitalism, they will add up the death toll, the literally billions of people who were allowed to die over a century or so because of the need to maintain the IP cartel system. Whether they will call that "mass murder" or "acceptable outcomes" depends on what economic system occupies the greatest mindshare in the most historians, and how out contingent, transient stage of late capitalism is viewed by them.

In an analogous system, think of the hundreds of millions who perished because of slavery, that is, the labor-intensive practices of early capitalism designed to produce agricultural commodities within monocultures at low cost. At the time, even though many agitated against it, the slavery system was regarded for generations as a necessary evil. With time, as the utilisation of fossil fuels and the employment of non-slaved masses within the system industrialisation replaced slave labor, the slave system lost mindshare. It began to be seen not as something desirable and even ordained by God, but as an unnecessary evil. For the most part, its economic output was replaced by in-situ colonialism, a system whereby the laboring masses were forcibly employed within the borders of coutnries rather than being transported en masse to remote destinations. In time, that economic system also lost relevance and was supplanted by more efficient modes of production and consumption.

Regimes change. Until it had developed sufficiently and established its own R&D and scientific regimes, the USA was one of the world's largest "pirate" nations. Right up until the start of the 20th century it was notorious for ignoring and refusing to recognise the IP and copyright systems of the "established" economic empires, allowing its industries to "steal" what they needed to ramp up their manufacturing. The more expensive products from the empires rarely had much chance of succeeding in the USA, unless they either sold at radically low cost or sub-contracted out their manufacturer at very unfavourable terms to native USA companies. Now that the USA has a huge stake in the current economic system, it effectively erects barriers to entry that prevent other emerging economies from doing what it itself did to emerge from backwater underdevelopment and a permanent existence as a low-margin commodities producer.

Microsoft has done plenty of evil things. Yet when they do something nice, such as opening tons of documentation to the Samba team, people spin it as part of some evil scheme. In reality, it is a nice move largely predicated by the EU judgement against them.

While I share the general dislike for Microsoft, it doesn't change that/. is very biased against Microsoft at the same time.

Microsoft has done plenty of evil things. Yet when they do something nice, such as opening tons of documentation to the Samba team, people spin it as part of some evil scheme. In reality, it is a nice move largely predicated by the EU judgement against them.

Thus you've answered your own question - they did something nice not out of altruism or community, but in an effort to avoid punishment for something. Would they have done it if the specter of EU punishment for other anti-competitive actions hadn't been looming? I'm thinking not. I won't even have to bring up the whole "embrace, extend, extinguish" ethic they provably have.

Microsoft did nothing "nice". They were dragged, kicking and screaming, into court and had their fingers slapped to the tune of over one billion US dollars by the EU for their misbehavior. And they attempted to poison the well by inserting patents into the published documents, patents incompatible with GPL software such as Samba. There are plenty of references to the court cases, but the interview with such developers of Samba as Jeremy Allison at http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070919214307459 [groklaw.net] are particularly enlightening.

And if you think there's anything "nice" about their efforts, go read the documentation. It was apparently written by monkeys trying to produce Hamlet, and bears little if any resemblance to how the protocols actually work.

Slashdot has *always* been very biased. Slashdot is pro Linux and Apple, and very anti Microsoft for example.

Slashdot may have a bias, but that doesn't preclude posting comments that are (for some definition of the word, anyway) "pro-MS", and get them modded up to +5, Insightful/Informative.

Thing is, if you go "with the bias", you can say absolutely anything so long as it conforms to that bias, and be modded up - no references needed. If you go against it, you will need sources to back up your assertions. But, well, if what you say is factual, you shouldn't have a problem with finding sources, and it's a good idea

That was actually one of the things I was thinking of. Do we really need to lower the barriers to entry? Are good ideas really going missing because "extensions are too hard?"

As a consumer of extensions, I have installed about 20 out of the 8,000 available. If I have a catalog of 80,000 jetpacks, does that mean I have to look through 10 times as much crap just to find the 10 useful ones?

Extensions were broken from day one. You only need to look at the fact that they are bound to specific versions for proof of that. Extensions see too much of the internals of the browser without any insulating abstraction. This means they are insecure, unstable and break when new versions are released.

This is in some cases a strength, because extensions can be very powerful, but it also a huge liability for both the programmers of the extensions, and for the programmers of Firefox itself.

Yet the extensions I have that are specifically bound to internals are exactly the ones that provide me with the most utility. The All-in-One Sidebar, Fission, FxIF, Cookie Button, FEBE, CLEO, User Agent Switcher, Xmarks, Exif Viewer, Aging Tabs, all those are bound to specific versions of Firefox because they're doing more than simply tampering with the http stream.

Could Firefox handle the binding any better? Sure. Could the team provide a route to handle backward and forward compatibility better? Again, yes. But that's a detail in an abstraction facade, and not what it looks like jetpacks are trying to be. Jetpacks look like "Greasemonkey scripts made official" with Mozilla's blessing. (Or maybe I'm seeing them as more limited than they plan for them.)

Gluing in some one elses code is not coding: $.get("http://developer.pixlr.com/_script/pixlr_minified.js", function(js){... } )

In fact, how many levels of derivation could a popular feature possibly use, my plugin references yours, references a library, that includes another external, etc.. all because some kiddies liked another kiddies script ad infinitum.

Jetpack is a Mozilla Labs project that enables anyone who knows HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to create powerful Firefox add-ons. Our goal is to allow anyone who can build a Web site to participate in making the Web a better place to work, communicate and play.

Or may be they are going in the right direction. If companies such as google, litl webbook and projects such as bespin are thinking along the lines of creating a GUI/web platform its possible that their's a new direction that computing is headed. One where older heads like us may not necessarily think to go.There are many parallels in computing (PC, Minicomputer, Internet)
Not saying the above is so (I find the above net GUI idea restrictive), it just pays to think about possibilities, such as a more robust GUI without the need for adding complex libraries.

...or maybe they just want to draw thousands of inexperienced developers into putting together a bunch of HTML and CSS that won't integrate in the UI...

And this is different than the current system how? Sure, there are TONS of great add-ons/plug-ins/whatever-they-are-called for FF, but honestly, the entry bar is pretty low, and for as many great ones there are, there are two crappy pieces of shit.

And this is different than the current system how? Sure, there are TONS of great add-ons/plug-ins/whatever-they-are-called for FF, but honestly, the entry bar is pretty low, and for as many great ones there are, there are two crappy pieces of shit.

Extensions and the customization they provide is THE reason I use Firefox. If they are so foolish as to eliminate this capability, they're going to lose a lot of users. If this happens, I won't upgrade for as long as I can, and when I'm eventually forced to switch, I'll find a browser that supports allowing me to customize it. I wouldn't be surprised at all if the OSS community forks the project over this.

Parent's sig applies perfectly to those that moderated him "insightful". The number of "Ifs" in the comment remind me of FOX news commentary.

Nowhere is it being proposed that you can no longer extend Firefox -- it's just that you will need to use a more user-friendly language than XUL to do it. It's called something else, and suddenly those that don't take the time to read the linked articles freak out and declare that the end of the world has come for Firefox. Does anyone not think that the Firefox te

It's significant that Mozilla gave priority to implementing "themes" and such, which are needed for vendor-branded browsers, while putting off implementation of user-oriented features like ad blocking. Is this a back-door effort to get ad-blocking out of Firefox?

Since you gave your conclusion first, I made the silly mistake of assuming you actually supported it somewhere in your post instead of undercutting it by demonstrating it isn't clear one way or the other.

You did make a populist plea, though. I'll give you points for excellent rabble rousing technique.

I actually sometimes find myself preferring Safari for actual web-browsing... especially for Slashdot! Firefox seems to slow down when loading long discussion pages, whereas Safari is quite fast. But extensions are Firefox's killer feature. AdBlock Plus, but also Zotero (citation management, only available for Firefox), Greasemonkey + DownloadThemAll... without the extensions, there's little that would make me prefer Firefox to Safari.

If Firefox wants to turn itself into another Internet Explorer, I say let them. It's their foot. From a UI perspective, most browsers are largely at parity nowadays anyway, and Mozilla should realize what it is that has made Firefox the most popular non-Microsoft browser. Put it this way: the reason I've used Firefox extensively for the past few years is the security plugins that are available. If you take that away from me, I have no real reason to stick with Firefox, and probably won't. Now, I've never wr

That's the actual strength of AdBlock, and the reason it currently cannot be implemented as a JetPack: AdBlock has the option of blocking the ads when the URL is found in the source, therefore not loading it. It works at a lower level than what the JetPack platform offers.

To me, ad-blocking is more than just not showing ads, it's about not being tracked by ad brokers that leave "web-bugs" all around the World Wide Web. Blocking requests to the ad servers themselves is what makes AdBlock far more useful than CSS and layout modifiers, and the primary reason I stay with Firefox in spite of its shortcomings. Adblock, together with the ability to black-list servers in the cookie manager with a simple "Remember this setting" checkbox, are actually the only reasons I continue to use Firefox.

If that happens, it's time to relentlessly savage Firefox and do everything practical from a geek perspective to reduce its adoption.That would be a deliberate betrayal of the user base, because extensions are the only reason to use Firefox.

The makers of ANY software should know their users will turn on them in a heartbeat when they choose to screw up.

If that happens, it's time to relentlessly savage Firefox and do everything practical from a geek perspective to reduce its adoption.That would be a deliberate betrayal of the user base, because extensions are the only reason to use Firefox.

The makers of ANY software should know their users will turn on them in a heartbeat when they choose to screw up.

Or exercise some good ol' open source muscle and fork it. Isn't that supposed to be one of th

Chrome extensions are entirely HTML/CSS/JavaScript, and so are many Chrome pages (the New Tab Page, the Downloads Tab, etc). I'd tag this badsummary, because it's not the idea of Jetpack that's the problem here, it's the implementation. From the first article, which is the only one that seems to be seriously concerned:

I like its power, I dislike its syntax. I _really_ dislike its syntax.... images are inline as data URLs because Jetpacks misses offline support and packaging; the HTML element inserted into the statusbar has to be precisely positioned and that will suck depending on the preferred user's font size;

Contrast to Chrome's extension API, which is fairly clean where it isn't strictly what's already available to any webpage. In particular, those two issues are addressed: Chrome extensions are packaged (more or less) as a cryptographically signed zipfile, so you can have separate images, scripts, etc; there are currently very well-defined ways to add a button either to the URL bar or to the browser itself, and when toolstrips were available (I don't think they are anymore), they were exposed as HTML pages with most of the work done for you in predefined CSS, so no absolute positioning (at least not that you have to do yourself).

integration with native or native-alike (hear xul) UI and cross-platform issues, a major concern

Basically, the article seems to be assuming there are (and will always be) advantages to XUL. To me, the answer to this is not to expose XUL, but to fix/extend the HTML used. In a way, I think Chrome proves that users really don't care that much about the UI looking and feeling "native", but care much more about it being themable.

When Firefox was first released, it was a breath of fresh air -- a fast, effective browser that discarded the bloat which plagued Seamonkey.

Firefox laid the groundwork that has brought us to the current state of browsers... there's a competitive market, except in the business space, where the inability to manage browser settings has made the enterprise the last refuge for Internet Explorer. Unfortunately, the project doesn't have the desire to expand its impact further -- they refuse to accept bug reports or feature requests regarding issues that are critical to business users, and shout you down when you try to complain.

So you have this great browser, but you can't script the install, can't manage update distribution (ie. autoupdate is not appropriate in many use cases), and manage config in a sane way.

Now instead of fixing those issues, they are "fixing" something that isn't broken -- the extension system that makes Firefox so cool for so many people!

Let's say you have a bunch of WebDevs who love using some popular extensions, and you'd like to provide them with a fully prepped workstation every time a box is built. (I have an SLA that calls for our users to have a fully functional new PC ready to go within 40 minutes of unboxing, and we unbox about 500 PCs/week.) Too bad -- unless you have a crew of smart masochist admins who spend a few hours/days packaging up a solution. (We can do this in minutes for 95% of Windows, Linux and even Mac apps via an API or consistent install mechanism) One exception: if you get lucky, Ubuntu has 20 people who package a few select extensions.

Or lets say you have a global distributed network linked by MPLS or Frame Relay with limited bandwidth. You have a population of Firefox users who run with admin rights (really bad practice on any platform btw), and would like to setup mirror servers for the Firefox update mechanism. Too bad -- you can't do that either, unless you hack each update and each client as well.

Or lets say you want to migrate Firefox user settings from workstation to workstation, or between VDI sessions or between linux terminal servers. Too bad -- Mozilla creates a directory with random characters for user profile data.

Or maybe you want to disable auto-update, because a critical 3rd party application won't work with Firefox 3.5 for another month. Again, you're fucked, unless you jump through hoops.

I get the message. I'm responsible for over 100,000 people's computing environment, and Mozilla could give two shits about me. That's fine.

The punchline is, Google will be finished porting Chrome to Mac and Linux soon. Then they'll provide enterprise manageability, as they did for other tools. Then, people like me who manage lots and lots of workstations will look at switching to have one, common, managed browser on 3 platforms. That's 100k people who'll go home and install Chrome and tell their friends how great it is. (Just like those home users who brought FF to work, except much faster, since there's no restrictive IT @ home)

I have never liked the Firefox design, and I have never trusted the XPI installer mechanism. Switching to an extension mechanism that doesn't open up the whole performance and security bag of worms the Firefox extensions do would be worth trying.

For me , personally, virtually every change since FF2.0 has been for the worse; the gui has gotten harder to use, simple things i need are hidden, extensions are constantly breaking....What has surprised me is that a group of devs hasn't forked to keep FF2 and all that was great in it, and try to add things that are really neat: how about a powerful business contacts manager, a la windows BCM, that is native in side FFHow about video that actually works ? (vlc has never worked well for me)

how about serious privacy (its clear 'they" are getting new tricks faster then ff can stop them)

how about a decent calendar - the thunderbird type calendars suck.....instead we get all sorts of useless tinkering with the gui..

Look, to be honest, I don't use FireFox because it is awesome, although it is pretty awesome. I use FireFox because it has AdBlock, which is the killer app for websites. Without AdBlock, the internet becomes immediately useless, with too much noise-to-signal. Other browsers have less compelling ad-blocking extensions; not compelling enough to use. My opinion of this "JetPack" thing will rise or fall with the success of AdBlock.

The reason I'm using Firefox is the because the extensions are so much better than on any other browser. AdBlock, FlashBlock, DownloadStatusbar, RefControl, NoScript. You can half-ass these on other browsers like Chrome or Opera, and I've done it, but in the end the ease and simplicity of it wins out, especially when I have to explain to other people how to do it and the first thing you do on a new machine is install a decent browser and extensions. I do not want to have to locate the profile directory and hand edit or copy things on every machine, much less have to explain to my parents how to do this.

If you cripple this to the level of Opera UserJS, which is fairly powerful but also a pain in the butt, then I have no reason not to move to Opera or Chrome.

Now if they can somehow make this transition while preserving the addon manager functionality and allowing actual browser extensions like DownloadStatusbar or TabMixPlus to work, then I'm fine with that. It's the results that count, not how it's implemented.